Spirituality differs from religion

Published 8:18 pm, Friday, March 15, 2013

"'No Religion' Is World's 3rd Largest Religion After Christianity and Muslims According to Pew Study" was the headline.

The story covered the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life report on the size and distribution of the world's religious groups as of 2010.

Although the December story on "The Global Religious Landscape" stated that worldwide more than eight in 10 people (84 percent) identify with a religious group, it indicated roughly one in six people (1.1 billion, or 16 percent) have no religious affiliation.

This makes the unaffiliated the third largest "religious group," behind Christians (2.2 billion, or 32 percent) and Muslims (1.6 billion, or 23 percent). The report noted many of the unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs, such as belief in God or a universal spirit, even though they do not identify with a particular faith community.

This followed a Pew report earlier in 2012 that documented a trend among U.S. adults not to identify with any religion. Taking advantage of a pun about Catholic women in religious orders asserting themselves during the election year ("Nuns on the Bus"), many headlines simply picked up on the Pew's own title for its report, "'Nones' on the Rise."

That report said one-fifth of adults in the U.S. and one-third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation. From 2007 to 2012 the percentage of American adults who have no religious affiliation increased from just over 15 percent to 20 percent. Of the religiously unaffiliated, 12 percent said they were atheists and 17 percent agnostic.

The U.S.-based report analyzed questions about shifting understandings of religion and spirituality and the relationships between them. Respondents were asked if they considered themselves to be "a religious person" and, in a separate question, if they considered themselves to be "a spiritual person." The report analyzed the extent to which people who identified as "religious" and those who identified themselves as "spiritual" were separate or overlapping groups.

Although for many, spirituality continues to be closely linked with religion, a growing number of individuals identify their spirituality as either loosely, or not at all, associated with an established religious tradition. This distinction is often enhanced by the college experience, as is documented in "Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students' Inner Lives," a seven-year project conducted by researchers at UCLA.

One student cited in a study I recently completed with two colleagues, "Forging the Male Spirit: The Spiritual Lives of American College Men," commented: "Spirituality is one's set of beliefs and actions and how those line up with religion, or not, and a relationship with God or whatever is out there. My own spirituality includes some questions about whether God is real or not." Other students were similarly eager to distance themselves from organized religion. As one said, "Spirituality gives you more creative ability than does religion. I would never call myself religious."

In our research, we found that traditional college-age men value their spirituality deeply but many had little use for organized religion.

The men found their spiritual lives and values nourished by sports, music, intellectual debates, intimate friendships, social service projects (many found fulfillment by working in soup kitchens or building houses with Habitat for Humanity) and deep discussions with close friends.

They often wrestled with "big questions," which are essentially spiritual questions: Who am I and what do I believe? What kind of person was I born to be and how can I become that person more fully? What interconnectedness is there between all things? Is it related to what some call God, the life force, a higher power, ultimate reality, cosmic nature or the Great Spirit?

For college-age students — women and as well as men — such questions shape their understandings of spirituality, and they want to explore these questions. The answers that they believe organized religions have traditionally offered do not seem pertinent to the questions these young people are asking, as they are on a quest for a new shared language about things "spiritual."